I'm the solo founder of a startup in the recruiting space, doing about $.5MM ARR and wondering whether I should raise a seed round.
Context: I've built everything up myself until now (~2.5 years since I started), the company is profitable, growing, and recently hired someone to help me with customer support. I have plenty of ideas and a solid roadmap for the future of the company, but I now feel as though I personally just don't have enough time/resources to take the company to the next level at a good enough speed if I keep doing it the way I've been doing it until now.
I know I could keep going bootstrapping and grow slower as I've done until now but am also a bit paranoid that someone in my space would raise the money I've been afraid to raise until now (seeing new players pop up), take my opportunity and obliterate me out of existence: it seems to me like the best way to secure my future and my company's future at this point could be to become the (fictional) competitor I'm so afraid of.
I've never raised any money but I think given the company profile & markets, I could raise 2-5MM for less than 20% of my company and this would give me some security at a decent price (help with hiring and growing). At the same time, I'm still a little unclear what the expectations of a VC firm would be for a company like mine and whether that would be aligned with me: I'm not looking for a lifestyle business and would prefer to go faster, but I also don't want to put on golden handcuffs.
I would particularly appreciate any feedback from founders of both funded and bootstrapped companies (or ideally founders with experience in both) with pros/cons for each route.
Thanks!
What's your sales process like? High-touch or low-touch? Do people sign up themselves or do you sell to every new user yourself? Do they require you to onboard them and teach them how to use the product ? Are the user and the buyer the same person? What price range and price tiers are you offering?
If you are the one personally selling the product, can someone else sell the product? Have you made a list of all the objections and arguments? Have you developed a sales-script you can give to someone in order to execute a sale? Which of these steps truly require someone to do them and have you reduced the "motions" requiring a human to their most irreducible form possible to date?
>recently hired someone to help me with customer support.
Why was your first hire in customer support? What do customer need support with? Do you have a list of all the tickets/issues and have you noticed patterns for the issues with the most impact? Which of these issues require human intervention, first by you then by the new hire? Can you reduce problematic aspects of the product that are generating these tickets through technical means? i.e: can you reduce or eliminate the underlying causes of tickets/issues that require support which are consuming time/resources?
>I could raise 2-5MM for less than 20% of my company and this would give me some security at a decent price (help with hiring and growing).
How would you deploy these funds? Hiring for what positions and why? Growing what? You want to accelerate and gain more speed: which part of this process do you want to go faster and why? Can you imagine ways to go faster by releasing the brakes and removing friction in some parts of the process as opposed to injecting fuel? The analogy is a car that's going slow that you can make go faster by releasing the brakes as opposed to hitting the gas pedal. What's holding your growth back?